One world
Five continents, divided by a single connected body of dead water.
Common knowledgeThere is no
Everything your character grew up knowing
There is no
going around.
One connected body of dead water wraps the world. A hull that touches it greys, loses buoyancy, and settles almost without a splash. Every road between continents leaves the ground.
ColdwaterThe ThreadKaerysAbout twelve hours by steam · a little over two hundred miles
FLT–04 · third approachFive rungs
Riders, herds, envelopes, steam, and quick crystal shaped the sky. Four still carry routes; the dragons refuse.
Eight years
Since the war ended in an armistice that settled none of what caused it.
A flat pewter plane with no wave, wake, tide, or reflection in it, under a lid of bone-pale fog that has sat on the same horizon since before anyone’s grandmother.
The Still is not the whole of the water. Rivers, lakes, and enclosed coastal basins stay ordinary: there are ferries on them, fisheries in them, and shipyards beside them, which is why the first airships were hulls that shipwrights already trusted. What vanished was the open crossing. The main body is called the Belt, its arms divide the continents, and every arm has a name, a width, a season, and somebody claiming to own the sky above it.
There is only choosing which arm to cross, and how wide it is where you cross it.
On common knowledge
Some of what follows is wrong, in the way common knowledge is always wrong — confidently, and in unison. Your character may believe it anyway, and probably should.
A path into the campaign
Start with the terms.
End where you wake.
First visit: read this route in order. Returning readers can use the contents panel or enter anywhere and follow what catches.
·
Read the front matter
Who assembled this record, how its evidence marks work, and what it deliberately withholds.
↗·Set the table
The campaign promises, level-five build rules, and how advancement works.
↗ILearn the shape
The dead water, five continents, and what a crossing costs in fuel, days, and people.
↗IIRead the sky
Four centuries of finding better ways over, and the grudge each way carries into port.
↗IIITell them apart
Who holds what, what they wear, what they fly, and what they are owed.
↗IVKnow the Windlass
One city, two governments, two currencies, and the one thing they run together.
↗VFollow the cost
How a person becomes a working part, and why abolition keeps failing.
↗VIChoose your history
Five years of war, the services near Kaerys, and the people who may remember you.
↗·Meet the routes
Established peoples, known enclaves, exceptional origins, and what human rule means in practice.
↗·Find your place
Turn all of it into an origin, an inheritance, and something unfinished.
↗·Reach Session I
The memory boundary, the last shared facts, and the instant play begins.
↗Chapter five
Its miracles have invoices.
Quick crystal made the impossible ordinary within fifty years. Hospitals work better. Ships stop falling out of the sky. Bridges hold.
It also opened routes the empire could not tax, ended one monopoly, financed both sides of a war, and left every government involved owing money to the same handful of refining concerns. Quick crystal holds skill and judgement because it was a person who had them. The voluntary Hall queue starts before dawn; courts, sentences, and guardians create other routes into the same industry.
When the world feels lived in
Choose what it made of you.
Six choices turn place and history into a position you can bring to session zero and argue with. Then the prologue carries that position to the instant play begins.